Scrum as a Mirror: Rethinking Organizational Culture

Explore the hidden barriers to successful Scrum adoption as Brian Milner and Lucy O'Keefe dive into organizational dysfunctions and cultural impediments in this insightful episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast.

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with Lucy O’Keefe to unpack the organizational dysfunctions highlighted in their talk at the Scrum Gathering.

They delve into how culture can significantly hinder Scrum adoption and discuss other common impediments like resistance to change, command and control leadership, and siloed teams. Emphasizing the importance of transparency, inspection, and adaptation, Brian and Lucy offer actionable insights to help organizations overcome these challenges.

Listeners will also learn why leadership understanding and stakeholder participation are crucial for successful Agile adoption and the necessity of training in Agile values and principles for true organizational change.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Lucy O’Keefe
Dart Frog Consulting
Path to CTC - Monthly Cohorts
#109 Leadership and Culture in DevOps with Claire Clark
Agile for Leaders
Join the Agile Mentors Community
Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Lucy O'Keefe has over 28 years of IT experience and has worn multiple hats in the Agile world - developer, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and now, Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST) where she uses her experience to ensure each student has a great training experience.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00)
Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner, and we have a favorite back with us today. We have Ms. Lucy O 'Keefe with us. Welcome in Lucy.

Lucy O'Keefe (00:12)
Thank you so much, Brian. Happy to be here again.

Brian (00:14)
Very happy to have Lucy back with us. Lucy and I saw each other recently. Actually, I think it was the first time we saw each other in person, right? Yeah. We finally saw each other in person at the Scrum Gathering that took place recently in New Orleans. And I had the pleasure of getting to see Lucy's talk that she had there at the Scrum Gathering. And...

Lucy O'Keefe (00:22)
It was the first time, yep. Finally.

Brian (00:41)
She gave a talk with Joe Miller called, Scrum Unmasked, Unveiling the Dysfunctions Within Our Organizations. And I thought it would be a good opportunity to bring Lucy back and talk a little bit about this topic, because this is an important topic. And it was a packed room, it was full of people that wanted to know about this as well. So I thought it'd be a good chance for us to share this with the audience. But to start this, actually, before I even begin, I get ahead of myself. myself here a little bit. For those who maybe haven't heard Lucy on the podcast before, Lucy is a CST. She has a CTC. Her company is called Dart Frog Consulting. And she also has started recently this mentoring program with a new smally that is kind of a really interesting concept. It's a CTC mentoring cohort. So if that's something you're interested in, We'll put links into our show notes that you can get in contact with her about that. But if you're interested in pursuing certified team coach certification with the Scrum Alliance, that's a really great way to do that. You get a group of people around it and kind of go on that journey together. But let's talk about this topic. And I thought a good way to start was actually to be a little bit meta about this. I want to go behind the scenes a little bit. and think about where this topic came from, what's the genesis of where this came from and how you and Joe hooked up on this. So give us a little bit of the backstory of where this idea came from.

Lucy O'Keefe (02:20)
So to start, Joe and I have worked together. We worked at a consulting firm together. And funny enough, we actually were both speakers at a virtual conference a few years ago. He was on the panel and I was an actual speaker, but we never met. Back then we met actually when we started working in the same consulting firm. And of course I left the consulting firm a few years ago to go independent, but we just kept in touch and we always wanted to do something together. so when, when I was trying to figure out topics for the scrum gathering in New Orleans, I reached out to him and I asked if he would want to do a talk with me. A lot of times it's much easier to do it with somebody else. And I thought it would be fun because he and I see eye to eye on a lot of stuff. And I think we, we complement each other pretty well. But when we were talking about what topics we'd want to talk about, I kind of always go back to the things that I've experienced when I've been in organizations. And I think, I think a lot of us have experienced kind of something, something similar where people are going to say, scrum just doesn't work for us. Right. I actually, it was actually one of my first blogs that I wrote probably six, seven years ago was about that, about people saying, it just doesn't work for us. There, you know, it's not something that we can do. So I kind of got this idea that this is what we should be talking about. And I always go back to. Ken Trebers quote, and I said this during the talk, you may recall, you know, scrum is like your mother -in -law, it points out all your faults. So this idea that scrum is holding up this mirror, you know, to the organization is something that I always talk about. And I think it's important for scrum masters and others in organizations to understand that, no, it's not scrum that's the issue. It's that we have all this stuff that's not, going well in our organizations and we're just putting Scrum on top of it without fixing the issues, right? So we're trying to put a band -aid on what's going on in our organization instead of looking at the root cause. So I just thought that that would be a great topic to talk about.

Brian (04:27)
I love that. And I think that's a great way to look at it because you're right. It's not something that's going to fix everything, but it does make it very revealing. I remember the phrase I've always heard people use is it's not a silver bullet, it's a silver mirror. You know, like it's going to reflect back very honestly to you what's going on. Awesome. Well, that's that. Thank you for the backstory. I really appreciate that because I know a lot of people, you know, if you're listening to this, you may be considering, you know, do I want to submit and try to speak at a conference? So.

Lucy O'Keefe (04:41)
Yep.

Brian (04:57)
just to give a little background to where those kind of ideas come from. I thought that would be interesting little sideline there. So let's get into our topic. Let's talk about some of these dysfunctions because I know the main point of this was talking about organizational dysfunctions, kind of some common problem. So hit us up. Give us a few of these big organizational dysfunctions that you guys talked about.

Lucy O'Keefe (05:22)
So I think the main one and one that's probably going to resonate with a lot of people is culture. For me, culture is always the biggest issue. People are the biggest issue, right? You know, as you know, you probably remember this, right? In the previous Scrum guide, it would say, Scrum is simple to understand, but difficult to master, right? Or difficult to implement because it involves people. So culture is the biggest issue and culture encompasses... quite a few things, right? It could be resistance to change within an organization. It could be a lack of empowerment. It could be command and control, which I'm sure you've seen in plenty of organizations. I've seen plenty of organizations, even though we know that we are hiring the best people, a lot of leaders or managers actually I'll call them, you know, still want to be in control, still want to be the people telling people what to do. And it's very hard to go to... to a way of working where it's like, okay, I need to remove myself from the equation and trust that these people are gonna do what they should be doing. So I think culture encompasses a lot of the other things that we talk about when we're talking about organizational impediments. Another thing is organizational structure. Are we highly hierarchical? Are we a matrixed organization? Do we still have these silo teams, right? That work on just specific skills? And I'm sure you've seen this. I'm sure you've worked in waterfall just like I have in the past, right? You have your business analysts on one side. You have your designers on another side and then your developers and then your testers, right? And they're all reporting into a business analyst or tester or developer or anything like that. So there is no cohesive team that has one. focus or one objective. You know, we're matric, you know, getting these people out of that matrix and putting them into a team. But they're all just interested in their own thing, right? It's a very siloed way of working. So it's very hard to make that transition into, okay, we are a product team and we work together. And we have to be dedicated and stable. Because we're not used to seeing that in a lot of organizations, people are not dedicated to teams. And we're talking about waterfall. I have barely seen any of that. I used to have a team where, and there was already a scrum team, but we had three BAs on the team and they were each 33%. And that's something that is very normal. And even when I'm teaching my classes and I'm sure you have the same questions or comments, a lot of people are like, well, this is very hard for us because we have John Doe here who, you know, he's in five different teams. How is he going to go to all these events? So that's definitely another organizational impediment, which for me kind of goes back to culture as well. Right? So those things are big things. Leadership not understanding. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, no, go ahead.

Brian (08:10)
Yes. Yeah. I was thinking, I was thinking, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I was just, I was thinking the same thing that when you said that, that just, yeah, it is very, the hierarchy of the organization is very cultural. And if you, you know, if we're, we're trying to empower teams and instill in them this idea that, Hey, you need to, in order to move fast, you've got to have autonomy and you've got to have the ability to go and make decisions. that's, that's very. much ingrained in how we structure our organization. If I have to get approval for everything I do, that's going to run counter to what we're trying to do in a Scrum environment. So I love that you made that connection. I absolutely agree with you. It's a very cultural thing.

Lucy O'Keefe (08:59)
It is, it is. Yeah. And as I said before, I think a lot of the impediments we see go back to culture, leadership, understanding leadership participation, a lot of organizations when they're thinking about agile, they're thinking about scrum. It's like, okay, the teams need to do that. All right. Let's, let's start in IT and our IT teams are going to start doing scrum and who cares about the rest of the organization. We're going to keep thinking the way that, that we've always been thinking. We're going to keep budgeting the way we've always budgeted. And then we have. We have a lot more resistance, a lot more conflict because we have a team that's trying to work in a certain way. And then you have stakeholders and leadership that are expecting things to be the way that they always were. So stakeholder participation, for example, you know, a lot of stakeholders are going to be like, well, I already told you what I want. Why are you coming to me every two weeks or, you know, however long our sprints are, you know, for to get feedback. You know what I want. I shouldn't have to talk to you about it. Right. So there's that lack of understanding of what's in it for them. So back to culture again, right, understanding that this is a whole cultural shift. It's not just a team shift. So leadership needs to understand that. And of course, as you know, you know, we have, you know, certified agile leadership programs that I'm trying not trying to do a plug here for those classes. I don't even teach them. But.

Brian (10:03)
Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Lucy O'Keefe (10:22)
it's so important that leadership understands what it means to be an agile organization and what it means to lead in an agile organization. And I think when they do that, when they're able to get that understanding, it's going to make it a lot easier for everybody to succeed. So once again, that is another big impediment that I've seen is the lack of leadership and stakeholder understanding.

Brian (10:46)
Yeah, absolutely agree. I mean, it's almost like the concept seems to be more, like you said, we'll start from the team and build up when really it should be more of a from a top down or even not even kind of whole, right. Right, it's kind of, it's a whole organization thing. And if we try to compartmentalize it and say, no, we're just gonna do this group.

Lucy O'Keefe (10:57)
up and down. Or even from both extremes and meet in the middle. Right? Yeah.

Brian (11:13)
then we're already kind of setting ourselves up to fail a little bit because I can't change the culture of just one segment of my organization. If I do that and they have a different culture than the rest of the organization, then we have cultures at odds with each other and they're set to fail. The more dominant one's gonna overtake the lesser one, which is usually gonna be the scrum side of things. So yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, yeah, frustration.

Lucy O'Keefe (11:37)
Exactly. Yeah. And it causes a lot of frustration. Yeah. It causes a lot of frustration for the team. Right. So I was actually at a, I was contracting at an agricultural manufacturing company. I may have brought this up before, but like the, the stakeholders didn't understand why they had to come to sprint and review, why, why they had to talk to the product owner instead of just talking to the engineers themselves. And it wasn't until I had. the lunch and learn with the stakeholders and help them understand what's in it for them because that's what's so important. How am I going to, how is it going to improve things for me if I abide by what you're trying to do? It wasn't until we did that, that they were like, I understand now why I need to talk to the product owner. I understand now why I shouldn't be dealing with the developers or the engineers themselves. I understand now why my feedback's needed. Yeah, it's great that now I have a say in the process. I have a say in the outcome. So it's not like people are trying to just be difficult. They just don't know any better, which brings us to one of the other organizational impediments, which is lack of training and understanding. Cause we can't just train the team. We have to, yeah, I mean, we don't have to train everyone in, you know, a CSM or anything like that. That's, that's not it. Right. But they need to understand the basics of how, how agile works. What are the values? What are the principles? What, what are the benefits of working in this manner? Right. It's, it's not about doing the thing, but it's how is this going to impact who is and how, how are things going to be better after you start working this way?

Brian (12:52)
Yeah. I've had a lot of conversations about this in the CSM class of just talking to different people and saying, you look at these agile manifesto values and principles and if we can't get an alignment on these things, right? If we can't look at these things and say, yeah, I agree. My philosophy is one of that's responding to change over following a plan. I believe that you should be more. able to respond to change, then you should be about following a plan. That's a fundamental kind of core value. And if my organization or if leaders in my organization, that's kind of the key here, right? If the leaders in the organization think, no, no, no, it's about following the plan. We have to establish this amazing plan and then follow the plan. Well, it doesn't really matter what we do at the team level because... somewhere up the chain of command, we're going to have to have that perfect plan that we try to execute on and the leadership is driving that. So we have a mismatch on just our core kind of understanding.

Lucy O'Keefe (14:26)
Exactly, exactly. So when I go into a new organization, one of the first things I do during my assessment phase, I actually go through every single one of the values and principles with leadership and with the teams. And I ask, which one of these are you doing well? And then we talk about that it's the minority usually. And then it's like, okay, what do we need to do to ensure that we are responding to change or following a plan or that we are... you know, focusing on working software instead of measuring something different. So we go through every single one of those because, as you said, that's where the value is. Understanding those values and principles, it's not about doing scrum, kanban, whatever it is. But if we are following those values and principles, then that's when we're truly going to be algebra and that's when we're going to see the benefits of working in this manner. It's not about the practice, but it's about your beliefs as an organization.

Brian (15:24)
Yeah, yeah, there's no practice that we're gonna put in place that's gonna solve it all, right? I mean, there's practices that can assist and help us, but the practice isn't the cure, right? The practice is just something that can assist. It's like having crutches, you know? The crutches aren't gonna heal you.

Lucy O'Keefe (15:30)
Not at all. A way to get there. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The practice just a vehicle, but you have to do the work to get there for sure.

Brian (15:51)
Yeah, that's a great point.

Lucy O'Keefe (15:53)
Yeah, so I think those were the main ones that we talked about there. You know, of course, we only had an hour, so it wasn't, there wasn't a lot of time to talk about every single one. But I think that, you know, and you were there, of course, but a lot of people came up with their own impediments that they were seeing in their organizations. And I think a lot of them aligned to what we had to say as well, because I think it is pretty standard in organizations that are just starting out.

Brian (16:02)
Sure. Yeah.

Lucy O'Keefe (16:22)
that you are seeing a lot. I mean, not just starting out actually. I mean, I've seen an organization that they say they've been agile for years and they still have a lot of these issues. So it's pretty clear that the culture again is the biggest issue with being able to adopt Scrum correctly or adopt an agile way of working correctly.

Brian (16:43)
Yeah, and I think you hit the nail on the head with the fact that it's just, there's not the time always spent to try to get to the root cause. We're a culture of quick fixes. We want to find something that's going to put in place and take this pill, do whatever, and then it's just going to be solved and everything's going to be fine. But you know, it... For instance, we've used this analogy quite often, the idea of weight loss. There are things that can assist you with that. There are things that can give you help along the way, but there's not a silver bullet to do that other than changing the way that your lifestyle is. You have to change. And please, anyone who's listening, don't think I'm saying this because I have this perfect, because I don't. I'm very bad at this. But I know that the way that I change You know, my overall health is by changing the lifestyle, changing what I eat, changing, you know, my exercise patterns. And that's hard work. It's hard to change that kind of core value in my life, but that's what actually makes the impact. The other things are dressing around it. Right.

Lucy O'Keefe (17:58)
Yeah, that's what's gonna make you change. Exactly. I mean, think about people who go for, and just staying with the same topic, right? For some bariatric surgery, right? So a lot of times, like the doctor will say, I used to watch my 600 pound life, don't judge me, a little bit, just because it's kind of, it's interesting. And yeah, I mean, they'd have to lose weight before they had the surgery.

Brian (18:06)
Yeah, yeah. Hahaha.

Lucy O'Keefe (18:25)
And the majority of people after they had the surgery and kind of lost weight, they just went back and balloon back up because they didn't change their lifestyle. So as you said, yeah, it's great that these band -aids exist, but if you're not going to do the work yourself, then it's really not going to work. So what is the root cause in this case, right? We're eating badly and we're not exercising. So that's what we need to change and not just, you know, take a pill or do a fad diet or get a surgery that... It's not gonna work if we don't change our ways.

Brian (18:55)
Right, and just for the listeners too, I mean, Lucy and I are not medical professionals in any way. So, you know, we do not mean in any way to try to belittle, you know, treatments and therapies that people use for legitimate purposes and all that stuff. Please understand, right? Gotta make that disclaimer. But I think you're right. You know, like I know in my life, there's been times when I thought, there's some diet supplement or there's something else that, you know, is gonna...

Lucy O'Keefe (19:01)
No. No, no, no.

Brian (19:25)
be the thing that really cures this and changes it. But what I've experienced time after time is, no, you really just got to do the hard work. You got to go to the gym and you got to get up and you got to change what you eat and that kind of stuff. And that's what really makes the impact. Well, the same thing here with our organizations. There are practices and the things we can put in place. And there's always hot ones that will be the hot one of the day. I remember when DevOps was kind of the... And we just talked about DevOps in our last episode. It is an important thing. It is a very important thing, and it can give you a lot of boost. But it's a set of practices. And our last guest, when we talked about this, talked about how it's really more of a mindset. It really is more about how we have to change the way we see things. So even there, when we approach things like DevOps, yes, there are practices, there are tools we can put in place. But if we don't change kind of our approach to how we do things, then it won't matter. It's just another thing that we have to learn and put into the workflow.

Lucy O'Keefe (20:32)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over and over again and getting the same results because that's what happens if you just keep putting band -aids on things, you're going to end up, you know, encountering the same issues over and over again. So if we don't have that mindset that we are going to make the change and the foundational change to ensure that everything works out, then, you know, then it's we're going to keep having the same issues and we're going to keep hearing this crime just doesn't work for us. Right.

Brian (20:37)
Ha ha ha.

Lucy O'Keefe (21:02)
So, yeah.

Brian (21:04)
There's something that also comes up in classes sometimes that I think one of the things that I found is that getting back to that transparency inspection adaptation, that if we as an organization really value that process and value the idea that, hey, we're going to be transparent about how we do things. We're going to not just ignore when there's a problem, but we're going to inspect it and get to the root cause. And then we're going to find a new way of doing things. that we can just latch onto that. That's a huge cultural change, right? And just kind of buying into those concepts. And what I found is in a lot of instances, I talked about this in the ACSM, a lot of instances, you can directly relate it back to a lack of one of those three things. Are we not being transparent? Are we not actually inspecting? Are we not actually adapting?

Lucy O'Keefe (21:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, those three pillars are definitely important. And I think that they're the foundation of what we are trying to do. And you're right, if we're not being transparent, inspecting and adapting, then we're not being agile, first of all, but that's something that needs to exist throughout the organization, not just within our work, within our teams, but are we being transparent in our relationships? Are we inspecting and adapting how we are dealing with our employees? Are we inspecting and adapting how we are budgeting? I mean, everything, right? We need to be... using that empiricism on a daily basis to ensure that we are headed in that direction. And if we do that, as you just said, the culture will shift organically when we're employing those three pillars, for sure.

Brian (22:42)
Yeah, absolutely agree. Well, let's, I want to meta this a little bit more here at the end, because I want to know kind of how it, how the fallout from this happened. So, so you, you have this idea, you work with Joe, you, you come up with this topic, you go, you present this. What kind of a follow -up did you get from this? Did you get a lot of good questions from people afterwards? How did the talk go? What did you, what, what, what kind of learnings did you take away from it after you gave the talk?

Lucy O'Keefe (22:47)
Yep. So I think it was received very well. There were quite a few people that came up to us afterwards and started asking questions to the point that I was actually late to a meeting after that. But anyway, I've had quite a few people reach out to me on LinkedIn, you know, talking about, we really loved your topic. And I actually, I got my reviews from it. And I think a lot of people appreciated that we had action items at the end.

Brian (23:22)
Hahaha.

Lucy O'Keefe (23:38)
So for those of you who are listening, we actually had an action plan where people could create an action plan on how they are going to start dealing with the organizational impediments in their organization. So a few people appreciated that. So it was pretty good, you know, pretty good feedback, I think, that we got from that. I would have loved for it to have been a little longer, so we could have gone a little deeper because it is, there is a lot that we can unpack. when we're talking about organizational impediments, one hour just isn't enough time for that, especially when you're trying to make it a more engaging session and not just talking at people. But I think if I had to do this again, I would probably try to do a little less and maybe go a little deeper instead of trying to talk about maybe so many things and barely touching the surface. But I think it was...

Brian (24:28)
Yeah.

Lucy O'Keefe (24:36)
I think it was pretty good. I know you're there, so you let me know.

Brian (24:38)
It was great. Yeah, no, it was great. And so, yeah, I hope you're encouraged by that. But yeah, it was a great talk. And like I said, I heard a lot of good comments from people afterwards. And I think that's pretty natural for us as speakers to kind of rethink afterward and say, maybe I could have done this a little bit different or I could have done this a different way. But, you know, it's tough. Like you said, you've got an hour. And within that hour, you're trying to work in some... interactivity, so it's not just you talking the whole time and you're trying to keep the group engaged. But then you get a lot of information and you just, I got to share all this stuff and I only have an hour to do it. Especially, as CSTs, we're used to talking for two days at a time. So, yeah, an hour is like, you know.

Lucy O'Keefe (25:26)
Exactly. So an hour is nothing. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian (25:32)
the break or something, but yeah, you're not used to trying to fit all that information down into a one hour stretch.

Lucy O'Keefe (25:40)
Yeah, and for me it's like I love answering questions. Like if I could do a talk and then do an hour of just answering questions, I think I'd be like really, really happy because I mean, even when I've, you know, taught with Mountain Goat and all that, you know, being able to answer questions at the end of class, that's like my favorite and I do that in my classes as well. So not being able to give time to actually answer, you know,

Brian (25:47)
Yeah.

Lucy O'Keefe (26:04)
questions from the people who are having the issues for me was very difficult not being able to do that because that's something that I enjoy. And, you know, but at the end of the day, I do love speaking. You know, I just, it's one of my passions now, which is kind of funny because I used to be really introverted. But yeah, I think, I know it was a really good experience. It was my first time speaking at the Scrum Gallery. I've spoken at smaller conferences before, but that was my first big one. So it was, it was great.

Brian (26:19)
Ha ha. Awesome.

Lucy O'Keefe (26:34)
I hope I'm able to do it again.

Brian (26:36)
Awesome. Well, it was great. It was a great talk. And I appreciate you coming on and sharing this information with us, because not everyone can come to the Scrum Gathering. And that's one of the reasons why we try to have some people come on that do speak at it, so we can share some of that information in these small little podcast windows. So. Well, Lucy, thank you again for coming on. I appreciate you sharing your talk with us and kind of the behind the scenes of it. And hopefully we can have you on again soon.

Lucy O'Keefe (27:11)
Thank you, Brian.